Valve is porting Steam and the Source engine to Linux

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Valve’s digital distribution service Steam has been offering up games for almost 9 years now, and yet until May last year it remained a Windows-only service. Then Valve made Mac gamers happy by porting not only the service, but its back catalog of games to Apple’s platform. Now, it looks as though the long rumored Linux port is finally going to happen.

Michael Larabel, the man behind the well-known Linux website Phoronix, was invited out to Valve’s offices in Bellevue, Washington. He has now returned and started sharing the details of what they showed him.

Apparently Valve has been working towards a Linux port of both the Steam service and Source engine for quite a while. The reason it has taken so long is there has been no real direction and focus on the project: developers there just work on it when they can and when they want to. That has now changed, with Gabe Newell taking the lead on pushing the project forward.

While at Valve, Larabel got to load up Ubuntu and launch a working version of the Steam client without need of Wine (used for running Windows apps on Linux). He has also confirmed that Left 4 Dead 2 is the game being used to test development/porting because it offers both a stable and up-to-date implementation of the Source engine. Once that is ported other games from Valve’s back catalog will follow, meaning Half-Life and Portal on Linux will be released eventually.

Based on Larabel’s account of what he saw and what he talked about with Newell, Linux users are likely to see a release at some point this year. It may be beta, and it may be limited to one Valve game, but that’s a great start. Larabel also believes Valve is going above and beyond what other services and games companies are doing on Linux, and that they will become the “most Linux-friendly game company.”